| International reach |
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| Written by Marcel Henri, Salans | |
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Salans’ head of IT updates LTJ on an e-collaboration project that supports the firm’s rapid international expansion and underpins its winning IT strategy.
Salans started in 1978 as Franco-American law firm based in Paris. Since then it has grown to be a full-service international law firm with over 700 lawyers globally, operating from 18 offices. As one of the early pioneers of legal services in the USSR (and subsequently the Commonwealth of Independent States) and central Europe, Salans has a unique combination of locations in emerging market hubs and key financial centres, from which it has a particular focus on cross-border work. In 2004, the firm actively set out to reinforce its global presence and within three years had opened offices in 11 new countries throughout central and southern Europe, Asia and the Middle East. ‘The successful integration of these newly joined teams was everyone’s number one priority,’ says Henri. ‘This was particularly challenging for IT because each office came with its own operating environment, infrastructure and work practices. We took a very pragmatic approach and went to the essentials first: e-mail, matter inception and practice management.’ ‘This process paid off and within a remarkably short time frame each new office was ‘connected’ and the local user community trained on these firmwide applications. However, that still left Salans with a variety of local systems which made the overall IT management unnecessarily complicated and didn’t facilitate team work and the sharing of information,’ he adds. E-collaborationThe fact that over 20% of Salans’ revenue comes from work ‘exported’ across offices reinforced the case for introducing a new and unified way of working. IT needed to strengthen the Salans ‘one firm, one approach’ model by providing lawyers with seamless access to documents, e-mails and client information from any office in the world. Also, the firm needed to move away from some ageing technologies that were still in place and were becoming an obstacle to further development. After close and careful consultation with the business and extensive benchmarking with other law firms, Salans set out to design the new desktop around Microsoft Outlook and the principle of an electronic ‘master file’. ‘We all know that lawyers spend all day in e-mail and we wanted to use this fact to keep things as simple as possible,’ explains Henri. ‘We were less preoccupied with being at the leading edge of technology than proposing a robust and intuitive interface that met with our true business needs such as collaboration, mobility and compliance.’ In 2007, the macro project internally christened ‘e-collaboration’ was officially launched. It presented a very large scope of change and the introduction of many new software packages. Microsoft Active Directory and MS-Exchange were installed on top of the existing VPN. Novell GroupWise was replaced by MS-Outlook which was configured to integrate closely with a number of additional applications, including:
Additionally, some of the larger offices were also equipped with eCopy scan stations with a direct connection to document management in order to facilitate the scanning and filing process of paper-based documents. The document management workspaces were designed to electronically replicate, and progressively supersede, the former paper ‘Master File’ as determined in the Salans internal ISO procedures. ‘As much as possible, we wished to keep the expertise and knowledge in-house and the firm took care to train internal staff whenever feasible. That said, we also worked with specialists such as Tikit on specific matters such as document management and contact management,’ comments Henri. The introduction of e-collaboration was also used as the vehicle to implement other important technological enhancements albeit less visible to the user community such as new solutions for anti-virus, web filtering, backups or PC imaging distribution, etc. ‘Because of our geographically dispersed network, the localisation of document repositories was a real concern to us. On one hand, the merits of central filing were clear; on the other we wanted to avoid network performance and risk management issues,’ says Henri. ‘In the end, we believe we found a good balance between local databases and a combination of synchronisation and replication mechanisms.’ Unicode support was another important consideration for Salans as a very significant percentage of its fee-earners use double-byte characters. ‘The capacity to use one’s local language at all stages of data processing possibly isn’t something that national firms need worry about,’ explains Henri. ‘However, ensuring that all our offices could use their native language and alphabet when managing mails, documents and contacts proved more challenging than had been expected. In that respect, Unicode was an important element to the software selection and testing process.’ The human factor‘When embarking on this exciting project, we all knew it would be vital to get buy-in from the business but it was also imperative for me to have full support from local IT teams,’ emphasises Henri. ‘They are the people on the ground, working with the users day-in day-out,’ he adds. To that end, in June 2007, Salans organized a three-day IT retreat in France dedicated to the e-collaboration project that brought together IT managers from all offices. ‘Working with people from so many different backgrounds is one of the most satisfying aspects of my job and I wanted to make sure everyone had an opportunity to voice their opinions, constraints and concerns,’ says Henri. ‘The seminar proved to be very successful and it created a tremendous group dynamic around our common project. Technical matters were discussed as well as other considerations such as local requirements for document retention/destruction or Data Protection Act, etc. I also made a number of commitments vis-à-vis user education, training and rollout arrangements. For example, it was agreed that each local IT manager would participate in situ in another office’s go-live before it was their turn as this would provide invaluable first-hand experience of every aspect of the migration process.’ Educating the end user was one of the areas of the project where Salans wanted to make a difference. ‘Due to the pressures of their daily responsibilities, getting lawyers and their assistants into training can be a real struggle,’ explains Henri. ‘However, without appropriate knowledge of the system we had to recognise that the business would not benefit from the full potential of the new environment (no matter how intuitive!). In addition, all offices were not equal in the face of change. For example, some had been using a document management system for years, whereas others had only ever used shared Windows folders. Therefore, we needed to find a flexible training model that could be adapted to everyone’s specific situation.’ In this context, Salans compiled a sufficiently flexible education toolkit that could be adapted to the particular requirements of each office. It included:
What next?This year will see the pursuit and completion of the e-collaboration project rollout but that’s not the only project keeping Salans’ IT busy. The firm is committed to pursuing its development and international expansion and there are already planned new additions in Hong Kong as well as in Continental Europe. Also, several offices have outgrown their existing premises and will relocate during the course of the year. The introduction of more standard systems such as Active Directory and MS-Exchange has opened up new possibilities for Salans in terms of technology. ‘With e-collaboration well on its way, we will move our attention to other important topics where I feel IT can help the business. Knowledge management is one example and telephony is another,’ says Henri. At the end of 2007, Henri travelled to Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond to get a better understanding of their roadmap for unified communications. ‘Although I feel Microsoft still has some way to go before seriously worrying the more established industry players, I honestly believe that there’s an enormous potential,’ he explains. ‘For this reason, Salans will shortly set up a pilot that combines a VoIP backend and the Microsoft software on the desktop. To my mind, unified communications will experience a similar take-off to e-mail over the past decade and I want to put Salans in a favourable position to easily adopt this technology.’ International reachBut Henri also has a personal pet project for this year which equally concerns the Legal IT world. ‘A few years ago, I founded a legal IT user-group in France that we called the “Cercle Informatique Avocats” aka CIA,’ he says. ‘At first, there were only a handful of firms and we met every couple of months to discuss subjects of common interest either with vendors or amongst ourselves.’ The word soon got around and there are now 40 member firms. ‘Because the group has increased so much in size, we all felt the need for a stronger structure and we have undertaken to create a non-profit association in 2008,’ says Henri. ‘There are far more ties within the legal IT sector in England and America than there are in Continental Europe. One of our goals has been to create a tighter networking scene both for IT directors among themselves but also with our vendors.’ Outside its regular meetings, the group has already organised its first off-site seminar along the lines of the English ‘by legal for legal’ model and they hope to hold its second annual event later this year. There are also ideas to open access to the group to corporate counsels as well as other European countries. Yet another example of international reach. Marcel Henri is head of IT at Salans. He was voted International IT Director of the Year at the Legal Technology Awards.
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Marcel Henri is a British national who has lived in France for over 25 years. His Anglo-French background is typical of the multicultural approach that pervades Salans, a firm he joined in 2000 as head of IT for the Paris office. Previously Henri had spent ten years working for a large American financial services company. At the turn of the millennium the Paris office had just under 300 users and was planning to develop and strengthen its IT footprint across all offices. In 2004, Henri was offered the role of global IT director which was a position formerly based in the United States. This change also coincided with the rapid acceleration of the firm’s international expansion. 
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